THE NEW YORKER other considerations and patterns of behavior as well. The players were chattels for far too long. I'm convinced that the sudden huge escalation in salaries came in part from a pent-up guilt among the owners about their delay in bringing about what was fair. Now the market has taken over. But it's hard to be an owner, and I trust and admire most of the ones I've come to know. It isn't easy to be a col- league and a competitor at the same time-to help set policy with the commissioner and to re- member at the same time that the idea is to have intense competi- tion. Baseball is a small indus- try-it's about like the paper-box business-but with this intense, worldwide visibility. It's like no other enterprise I've ever heard of." On the balk rule: "It's beginning to work out. The pitchers have adjusted, by and large, and the media are calm- ing down, too, I hope. Our National League umpires began calling that full stop last year, so it's not all that new. I've been kidded for adding the word 'discernible' to the language of base- ball, but there were ten or twelve other people in the room when we agreed on the language, and they all knew what it meant and what we were after. It had got so that the pitchers were just changing direction out there, instead of coming to the stop that the rules called for. Now they understand What still fries me is the complaint that the balk calls were slowing up the game. Look, the pitcher balks, an um- pire puts up his hand and points to the next base, and the base runner walks down there-it all takes less time than a batter stepping out and refastening his batting glove." G IAMA TTI sustained this lecternless flow without pause or visible ef- fort, and kept his full attention on the game and its sideshows as well. He smoked Benson & Hedges cigarettes and drank a soda and chatted amicably with his colleagues and with a party of young men just behind us, whose tickets to the game had been left for them by John Franco, the Cincinnati bullpen ace-a schoolmate of theirs at Lafayette High School, in Brooklyn. "Sandy Koufax's old school," Gia- matti said when they told us about this. "Also Fred Wilpon's-you know, the 57 [1 0 P 5EC [T #713-8 WEA PoN .:\ ;..: :-:.. / / 32;600 \\ 15 tQ.-r 1/ viJeoto.r 5 oo Co m f ( t eJ fJ5.ds . Mets' co-owner. And then Franco went on to pitch at St. John's, didn't he?" And very soon he was discussing which Italian neighborhood and which streets in Brooklyn our neighbors and John Franco had grown up in, and which city parks they had played in there. "Y ou're a fan," one of the young men said. "Thank you, sir," Giamatti said. The names of the National League starters for the All-Star game, less than a week away, went up on the scoreboard, and we discussed the lineup, position by position, and who wasn't there and why. Then the mes- sage disappeared, and Giamatti said, "Aw, c'mon! Leave it up there a min- ute, will you! That's my franchise, just for this week." "I detect a bias," said one of the men behind us. "Yeah, if you'd been in the other league, you'd have had Billy Martin shot-right?" said his companion. Giamatti was silent, just barely, but he fielded the inevitable next question, about his current relations with Pete Rose, without missing a step. "Pete's a pro," he said. "He doesn't agree about the thirty days, but we've talked about it. He's a great man. " To me, he added that he had received unsigned ballots from the twelve league managers list- ing their choices for the pitchers to be named to the All-Star squad-the league handles that part, not the fans -and that one of the ballots had come in with "Thirty days is still too long!" written across the bottom. "I saw Pete r;(DOO ml ð,sk',rf s 12.1((" [q,q 12,5"00 c.G\S { N vJ Coke 75/00() cOf1e.s ðr World Journo-l Tr,bv"1<. (l C40J . today," Giamatti said, "and the first thing he said was 'You get my ballot?' He was tickled." I said that thirty days had seemed just about right to me (one of the umpires, Dave Pallone, had been pelted with objects thrown from the Cincin- nati stands after the argument and the shoving incident, and had actually been forced to leave the field -a first in my baseball recollection), and added that I'd wondered about the kind of complaints that had come into his office after the decision, and their number. "Well, we didn't keep exact count," Giamatti said, "but there must have been at least five hundred letters, and a few hundred phone calls on top of that. Seventy-five or eighty per cent of the mail opposed the decision, and the great majority of those complaints came from Ohio and Kentucky, which is Reds country And I'm not even talking about the obscene mail and calls-we don't pay attention to those. The letters in support of the suspension came from allover, but there weren't as many, of course. At that, the number of Pete Rose letters didn't approach what came to me in New Haven in 1981 after I made a speech laying into the Moral Majority, and the level of bit- terness in this one didn't come close to what I heard after I once refused to let the Yale Glee Club sing the Solidarity anthem in a broadcast for the Voice of America. George Will practically stripped me of my citizenship. I was accustomed to being called a dangerous right-wing radical, but this time the student press began to compare me